Praising it New
Monroe C. Beardsley
Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached frombiographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was thedominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since thattime, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition tothe approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remainsone of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continuesto be a controversial approach to reading literature.
Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters,Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren.Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticismand transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the Americanpoet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: “I do not believe there has been anotherage in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry hasbeen written.”
This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism availableagain, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of itschief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.
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About Monroe C. Beardsley
Reviews for Praising it New
Virginia Quarterly Review
“In Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, Garrick Davis offers poets and students an exceptionally well chosen selection from the theoretical essays of the New Criticism in hopes that it will remain an available influence. They are far more interesting than such essays generally tend to be—a strength of the best of the New Critics and one that will continue to serve them well with both an academic and a general audience.”
Eclectica Magazine
“This anthology is both important and necessary. No other collection gives us such an excellent opportunity to go back to the New Criticism and see it again, as if for the first time.”
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing
“Just how seriously the New Critics took poetry, and how much subtlety and conviction they brought to reading it, can be seen on every page of Praising It New, an excellent new anthology of the New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.”
The New York Sun
“It is clear from reading the lapidary works in Praising It New that the New Critics were not stern moralists upholding rigid orthodoxies, as their opponents imply. Like other critics of the period
not least Trilling and Wilson
they saw poems and novels opening out into life in all its variety, nuance and incompleteness.”
The Wall Street Journal
“The essays in Praising It New still carry a potent charge for anyone interested in what makes the best poems tick. Davis has performed a service to readers (often in the face of recalcitrant publishers unwilling to make works available for reprint at reasonable rates), and the book will be of particular interest to poets and students of poetry. Whether or not teachers will have the good sense to assign it remains to be seen.” “Davis’s notes are excellent: how charming to be told that, as a young instructor, Jarrell coached the tennis team at Kenyon.”
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